I have a shell with colors enabled:
man -P cat blabla > afile
somefile contains escape characters for coloring. Now I want to output somefile to the terminal with its coloring. I tried:
cat afile
But there isn’t any formatting at all. The only way I found is by using
less afile
But I don’t want a pager. I just want to output the file and do not enter some interactive mode. There must be a simple command to do that, but I wasn’t able to find it 🙂
Advertisement
Answer
The command I was looking for is called ul
(do underlining):
/usr/bin/man -P cat somecommand | ul
It formats the BACKSPACE escape format from groff nicely for the terminal.